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How to Think Clearly When Everyone is Scared
I wrote the following in 2008. It’s even more relevant today.
Over the past month or so, since the financial market crisis has deepened, I’ve had numerous conversations with executives. Several C-Level executives said that they were “scared” about what was happening. I’ve never heard that before in the many years that I’ve been working with business people. That type of reaction certainly made me take this crisis seriously, not because I was really worried about how we, as a country, would deal with it, but because I was worried about the collective emotional reactions, especially of our leaders.
When you are scared or overly anxious, it’s almost impossible to make good decisions. To put it succinctly, fear and anxiety causes neural reactions in our brain that activate our fight or flight responses akin to how animals react when threatened. The fear based neural reactions over power our capacity to think rationally, although most people think they are thinking rationally (that is truly scary). Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., author of Emotional Intelligence, called this physical/chemical reaction, “neural hijacking” or “emotional hijacking.” (The first two chapters of Goleman’s book provide a very good overview of the science behind these concepts.)
The Greek philosopher Epictetus once said, “We are disturbed not by events, but by our opinions of those events.” Right now…
